It is almost daily that we learn of a large land or forest fire that rages out of control. These fires sweep through forests, woodlands, residential communities, resulting in tremendous financial losses, not to mention the loss of human lives and the personal losses and trauma suffered by victims of such fires.
No doubt that land and forest fires are a serious problem here in the United States as well as other parts of the world. While we campaign and ask people to be cautious so as to prevent land and forest fires, they still occur and their frequency is hardly diminished. Prevention is important and should be continued to be stressed. But control and preventing the spread of an already existing fire is important also because such fires are going to occur, and accordingly we must learn how to best control such land and forest fires to save lives, reduce personal sufferings and trauma, and to protect our great natural resources and to prevent huge financial losses that are inherent in such fires.
Controlling and preventing the spread of land and forest fires is a difficult and frustrating undertaking. Often the fire is large and this in itself makes the fire harder to control and maintain. In addition where the fire is spread over a substantial area, this causes additional problems inasmuch as the area to protect is relatively large. In certain cases if we add to that dry and/or windy conditions, the problems are multiplied and complicated and the fire is even more difficult to maintain and control.
There are presently accepted methods and techniques for controlling and preventing the spread of land and forest fires. These include the dumping of large amounts of water from aircrafts and also includes attempting to back burn from an area towards the fire so as to effectively remove the intermediate trees and undergrowth, woodland and other material and structure that fuels the fire. Dumping water from aircraft is expensive, time consuming, and often relatively inefficient. This is because, in part at least, one has to have access to water and be able to retrieve the water and make a delivery rather quickly. This cannot always be done, and especially cannot be done very efficiently.
With respect to back burning towards the fire or fire area, this lends itself to special geographical conditions. For example, back burning can be effective where the back burning strip is started adjacent a natural barrier that enables one to control the spread of fire in the opposite direction of where the real fire or fire area exists. Often, however, back burning is not practical nor efficient because of the inability to control and precisely direct the back burning fire.
In summary there is still a great need for new approaches and techniques to fight, control and maintain land and forest fires. There is still the potential to save many lives and to protect vast amounts of natural resources and woodlands.